Bios(Partial).Tulsa, OK- SMITH, John Nelson
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Posted by George Henson [unpoetaloco@yahoo.com] on 1/11/2005

I would like for you to consider placing my great-grandfather, 
John Nelson Smith, who arrived in Dawson, IT (now Tulsa) in 1889 
with his wife Laura and three daughters, Nora, Ollie and Rosa. 
A fourth daughter, Lucy Belle, was born in Dawson.  

 

He owned and operated the Smith Bros Coal Co in Dawson for 
many years.  As one of the only early residents with strong 
mule teams and a scraper, the city of Tulsa paid him to level 
Main Street.  Around 1893, he moved to Tulsa proper and lived 
in a house located at 3rd & Main. In 1894, my grandmother, 
Lottie Agnes Smith, his fifth and last daughter was born.  

 

In that same year, his mother, Harriett Smith, married the 
Rev. Sylvester Morris, an itinerant Methodist minister who 
had arrived in 1887 and built a house on land deeded by Pleasant 
Porter, Principle Chief of the Creek Nation.  The house, which 
is today recognized as Tulsa's oldest surviving house, was 
located on what eventually became Cheyenne Street in downtown 
Tulsa. The house was moved to Pioneer Corner in 1976. 

In his 1923 book, The Beginnings of Tulsa, J M Hall, Tulsa's 
founder, wrote the following about my great-grandfather: 
"John Smith was in the coal business here for a number of years, 
having arrived in Tulsa at an early date. He died a year or two 
ago but is fondly remembered by the pioneers."